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President Rivlin addresses United Nations

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  • President Rivlin addresses United Nations

    J-Wire Jewish Australian News Service
    Jan 29 2015


    President Rivlin addresses United Nations


    Israel's President Reuven Rivlin has addressed the United Nations
    General Assembly in New York...and tells its members "never again".

    His address in full:

    stand before you, at a time of great tension in our region. My heart
    and my thoughts, are with my people in Israel. Terrorism does not
    distinguish between blood. In this war, all of us, all the nations
    united, countries of the free world, must form a united front. Today
    we are marking the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the
    Victims of the Holocaust. It is seventy years since the Red Army
    threw open the gates of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Now in its
    tenth year, this day was established in the calendar of the United
    Nations, at the initiative of the former Israeli Foreign Minister,
    Silvan Shalom, and each year since then, this Assembly has marked
    this day, with the commitment to preserve the memory of the Holocaust.

    Paul Celan, the great Jewish poet of the 20th century, himself a
    prisoner in a Nazi work camp, once said, "Only in one's mother tongue
    can one speak one's own truth. In a foreign tongue, the poet lies."
    My friends, I am no poet, but I must agree, that there are truths,
    there are prayers, and there is pain, deep pain, that one can only
    express in one's mother tongue. Therefore, on this important day, I
    have chosen to stand before you, and speak in the language of my
    mother, my father, in the ancient language of my forefathers, the same
    language that my grandchildren speak today.

    This is the same language in which my fellow Jews cried "Shema
    Yisrael" Hear O' Israel, as they were marched to the gas chambers. The
    language of my brothers and sisters, whose memory we honor today.

    "Oh that my head was water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I
    might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people! .
    . . For the mountains will I take up a weeping and wailing, and for
    the pastures of the wilderness a lamentation." [Jeremiah, chapters
    8,9]

    Ladies and Gentlemen. In 1915, when the members of the Armenian
    nation were being massacred, Avshalom Feinberg, a leading member of
    Nili, the Jewish underground which cooperated with the Allies during
    the First World War, wrote the following and I quote, "My teeth have
    been ground down with worry, whose turn is next? When I walked on the
    blessed and holy ground on my way up to Jerusalem, I asked myself if
    we are living in our modern era, in 1915, or in the days of Titus or
    Nebuchadnezzar? Did I, a Jew, forget that I am a Jew? I also asked
    myself if I have the right to weep 'over the tragedy of my people'
    only, and whether the Prophet Jeremiah did not shed tears of blood for
    the Armenians as well? "

    Avshalom Feinberg wrote that exactly one hundred years ago, one
    hundred years of hesitation and denial. But in the Land of Israel of
    that time, in the Jerusalem in which I was born, no one denied the
    massacre that had taken place. The residents of Jerusalem, my parents
    and the members of my family, saw the Armenian refugees arriving by
    the thousands - starving, piteous survivors of calamity. In Jerusalem
    they found shelter and their descendents continue to live there to
    this day.

    There were two questions reverberating then, whose turn is it next?
    And will we Jews weep tears of blood for the tragedy of others too?
    The first question was answered by history, some two decades later.
    The Jews were next. We, the members of my people, were next. In the
    valley of death of Europe it was the Jewish People who were the
    victims of a methodical, brutal, perverted and murderous
    extermination. Six million people, one-third of my nation, about a
    million and a half of them children, were killed, slaughtered,
    suffocated, gassed to death, buried alive, burnt, massacred, died from
    hunger, from thirst, from disease, and other gruesome kinds of death,
    in the most horrifying crime ever committed in the history of the
    human race. The answer to the second question asked by Feinberg.
    Truly, shall we weep, each one of us, only for our own nation's
    tragedy, or shall we be able to cry also for the tragedies of others;
    for the tragedy of wounded children from Syria; for the tragedy of the
    young men and women from Europe, from the Middle East, from Africa and
    from Asia. This question still awaits an answer.

    Ladies and Gentlemen. There has been no atrocity in the history of
    the human race to compare in its viciousness, its scope and its
    magnitude, with the Holocaust of the Jewish People. However, the
    slaughter of nations and of communities was not born in Nazi Germany
    and did not cease with the opening of the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau,
    Majdanek and Buchenwald. Now, in our own time, when the
    fundamentalist viper is raising its ugly head, we must remember that
    evil is not the property of any specific religion; just as it is not
    the attribute of any specific country or ethnic group. It is evil,
    that by its very nature, seeks to differentiate and discriminate
    between one life and another, between one human being and another,
    while the only real difference is between good and bad; between
    humanity and darkness. For exactly that reason, those who regard
    Islam, Judaism, or Christianity, as enemies of the world are wrong and
    they mislead others. My father, Yosef Yoel Rivlin, of blessed memory,
    devoted his life to translating the Quran into Hebrew, believing in
    the importance of dialogue and the cultural significance of the Quran
    for all the children of Abraham. As my father's son, I too believe
    implicitly that neither the West, nor the Christians nor the Jews are
    at war with Islam. Right now, Islam encompasses, under its enormous
    wings, victims of persecution and of terrorism, while at the same time
    it also serves as the banner of the attackers. The victims consist of
    hundreds of thousands of Muslim men and women, together with
    Christians, Yazidis, Kurds and Druze, each one of them a helpless
    victim of vicious barbarity, of wicked terrorism that has nothing at
    all to do with the religion or with the words of the Prophet. It is
    our duty and our responsibility to fight without mercy against the
    attackers; just as it is our duty and our responsibility to protect
    all the victims.

    Ladies and Gentlemen. The United Nations Organization arose on the
    basis of the great visions of peace of the prophets of Israel, "They
    shall beat their swords into plowshares"; it was established on the
    foundations of human solidarity and the values of humanism. But above
    all, this Assembly arose on the ruins left by that war of devastation,
    the Second World War.

    This day, the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the
    Victims of the Holocaust, is not just a gesture of memorial for the
    members of the Jewish People, the victims, or even the survivors.
    This day, this International Day of Commemoration, is not merely
    another memorial day on the UN's annual calendar. This day - so I
    believe - is the most important day on that calendar. "Never again",
    is not just a pledge by the survivors, and also not a pledge by the
    world only to the members of the Jewish People. "Never again" is,
    first and foremost, the very essence of this United Nations
    Organization, it is its mission, it is the primary and principal
    rationale for its existence.

    Since the establishment of this organization following that world war
    that claimed so very many casualties, the UN has expanded and branched
    out. Today, its enterprises include economic and environmental
    development, preservation of heritage and the maintenance of peace.
    But despite all this, on this day, we once again remember the essence
    of the mission of this institution: all-out war against genocide.

    To our great regret, since the UN was established - this rationale for
    its existence, its very raison d'ĂȘtre, has become ever more acute.
    Bosnia; Rwanda; Sudan; Cambodia; Syria; Nigeria. These are just a few
    of the places where nations and communities have been slaughtered in a
    way that reminded the world that the Holocaust of the Jews was not the
    final chapter in the brutal scheme of man against his fellow man Each
    and every one of them were victims of genocide, even without wearing a
    yellow star. As a Jew, as a Zionist, as an Israeli, as a human being,
    even though my hands are tied - my heart weeps together with those
    anonymous people marching to a mass grave. When we stand here today
    and declare, "Never again", we call out, never again racism and
    incitement; never again anti-Semitism; never again systematic rape and
    humiliation; never again concentration camps and torture; never again
    killing pits and mass graves, gas chambers and crematoria; never again
    - this is the task set before the gates of this Assembly. This is the
    mission laid before us.

    Ladies and Gentlemen. On this day we must ask ourselves honestly, is
    our struggle, the struggle of this Assembly, against genocide,
    effective enough? Was it effective enough then in Bosnia? Was it
    effective in preventing the killing in Khojaly? Of Afghans by the
    Taliban? Is it effective enough today in Syria? Or in the face of the
    atrocities of Boko Haram in Nigeria? Are we shedding too many tears,
    and taking too little action? I am afraid that the United Nations
    "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide"
    that came into force as long as sixty-four years ago, has remained a
    merely symbolic document. It did not succeed in realizing its
    commitment and fulfilling the objective that underpins the
    establishment of the United Nations Organization. Therefore, this
    institution, where we are standing today, has a duty of unparalleled
    challenge not to make do with statements but rather to push ahead with
    decisive action. The international community that is joined together
    in this organization bears the duty to lay down the red lines that
    define genocide - and to agree that the crossing of those red lines
    makes it compulsory to intervene. On the other hand, and in the same
    breath, we must remember that definition of the red lines requires
    putting an end to the devaluation and the cynical, supposedly
    objective usage in rhetoric on human rights of concepts such as
    "genocide", for political purposes. Thus, for years, this Assembly
    (whose resolution validated the establishment of the State of Israel)
    identified Zionism - the Jewish revival movement - with its greatest
    enemy, racism. That shameful UN resolution, number 3379 - has since
    been annulled. However, unfounded comparisons of that type, to which
    we, as Israelis, are constantly exposed (among them the attempt to
    make a link between Israel and genocide, and only recently, once
    again, with war crimes), not only do they confuse between partner and
    enemy; they also sabotage the ability of this Assembly to effectively
    fight the phenomenon of genocide.

    My friends, at the end of the day, this Assembly too, like any
    political institution, is motivated by many different considerations
    and interests. Even if we agree on clear red lines - that is not
    enough. We must agree that in the fight against genocide - the
    humanitarian and moral consideration must take precedence over
    economic, political and other interests. As a member of the Jewish
    People, I stand here before you and say, nations cannot be saved and
    must not be saved 'as an afterthought', or from considerations of cost
    benefit.

    Unless the moral fire burns within us, the lesson of the Holocaust
    will never be learned. Communities and nations will continue to be
    murdered, children, women, men and the elderly will continue to march
    to their death to the enlightened music of the 'orchestra of death',
    against the background of a cynical and apathetic world, and through
    no fault of their own. The oath of "never again" will remain hollow
    and defiled, and we, all of us, will remain forever - prisoners of the
    camps.

    Ladies and Gentlemen, to the extent that we believe that the voice of
    justice has not been silenced; to the extent that we believe in the
    dream of a different, more compassionate human race; we have the duty,
    here, in this Assembly, to act together as a determined and unified
    international community, which does not yield to narrow and
    inappropriate interests. In the name of the members of my People,
    victims of the Holocaust; in the name of the hopeless, persecuted
    people; in the name of our children; we must remain silent no longer
    we must rise up and take action.

    As I conclude, I would like to return to the words of the ancient and
    sorrowful Jewish Yizkor memorial prayer for victims of the Holocaust:
    'Judge of the earth, please remember the rivers of blood shed like
    water, the blood of fathers and sons, the blood of mothers and their
    babies . . . The cry of "Shema Yisrael" called out by those taken to
    their death are not silenced; and may the moans of the tortured rise
    up to thy heavenly throne.'

    May the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, and the memory of the
    persecuted and the tortured be engraved upon our hearts forever. May
    their souls be bound up in the bond of life. Amen.

    http://www.jwire.com.au/president-rivlin-addresses-united-nations/

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